A master of color in black and white

When Saul Leiter died last November at the age of 89, he was largely unknown outside the art world — and even within, he had been overlooked until relatively recently. And that was fine by him.

A prolific photographer who spent six decades roaming and documenting the streets of New York City, Leiter was a reclusive figure who took pictures simply because he loved to — not because he sought recognition or accolades. “Fame,” Leiter told a photography blog in 2009, “is of no use.”

“A lot of artists are consumed by their legacies and what will happen, but he wasn’t,” recalled Margit Erb, Leiter’s longtime assistant and one of the few allowed into his private world. “To him, creating was like breathing. It was something he needed to do everyday.”

And Leiter did, walking the city with a camera right up until the week he died, always in search of the beauty of the everyday. Along the way, he amassed a massive collection of work, hundreds of thousands of photos of New York dating back to the 1940s that mostly sat in boxes around his apartment in Manhattan’s East Village — most of them unseen by anyone except for him.

But the rare images that had trickled out over the years made an impact — including fashion work published in Harper’s Bazaar and a show in the early 1960s at the short-lived Image Gallery, one of the first art venues in New York to exclusively focus on photography and where future legends, including Garry Winogrand and Robert Frank, exhibited some of their early work. He got to know other artists, such as Eugene Smith, Diane Arbus and Andy Warhol — whose pictures he took and stored away before he, too, largely disappeared.

But in 1993, the art world took another look at Leiter when he was included in a book profiling “The New York School” artists whose images of a rapidly changing New York City as it transitioned from the Great Depression era of the 1930s to the socially turbulent 1960s helped cement photography as a serious form of art. That led to a well-received gallery show in New York a few years later, and in 2005, a show of his early color photography of Manhattan’s streets — cast in rich, Kodachrome hues of pinks and reds and yellows when most photographers were still using black and white film — soon earned him a reputation as one of the greatest color photographers of the modern age.

But the focus on Leiter’s color work has largely overshadowed his black and white photography, which uses shadows, light and reflections to capture New York in the same quiet, dream-like state that defined his later work.

His black and white images are the subject of a show opening Sept. 18 at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York and a new two-volume monograph — “Saul Leiter: Early Black and White” — featuring more than a hundred previously unseen photographs taken by Leiter in the early days of his career.

Leiter was also a painter, and in many ways, his color photography was driven by his dexterous use of the palette — the hues of umbrellas, awnings and signs used to create an impressionistic view of the city streets. The color was the star, while the people within the frame were often mysterious — blurry or in silhouette or concealed in some way by doorways or hats or raindrops on a window.

The composition of the images reflected Leiter’s interest in calling attention to what was happening beyond the surface, the veiled reality of life. “There are things that are out in the open, and then there are thing that are hidden, and life has more to do, the real world has more to do with what is hidden,” Leiter said “In No Great Hurry,” a 2013 documentary about his life, released just before he died.

In many ways, Leiter’s black and white work more sharply defines his fascination with the hidden — in some cases because the people he is photographing are more clearly in focus. Their faces, lost in thought, are seen clearly reflected in mirrors and storefront windows. There are even self-portraits of Leiter, who until recently, was perhaps the most hidden of all.

But in coming years, Leiter and his art will surely become less of a mystery. Since his death last November, Erb and another assistant have been holed up at the late artist’s apartment, sorting and cataloging all of the work he left behind — including boxes of prints, negatives and paintings.

So far, they’ve found more than 250,000 negatives and slides of his work — both in color and in black and white — and recently found a suitcase of several hundred rolls of Kodachrome film that had not been developed and no longer can be, since processing for that type of film no longer exists.

The goal is to create a digital archive of his work through the newly created Saul Leiter Foundation, which is already planning books to present previously unseen images and showcase his paintings, which are largely unknown. The hope is that it will earn Leiter the appreciation and respect his supporters believe he deserves, the fame he spent so much of his life trying to avoid.

"The world only has a glimpse of the tremendous artist he was,” Erb said. “He was someone who was creatively producing every single day for more than 65 years. He didn’t stop. Every day he went out with a camera. … It’s going to be a lifetime of going through his work and learning from him.”